1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to organizers and, more particularly, to a wire mesh organizer folded into a serpentine-like shape and having ends supported by the vertical surfaces of a cupboard, cabinet or shelf.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a modern day kitchen there are always a large number of bulky, shallow draft utensils which are difficult to store accessibly. Items such as frying pans, pot lids, cookie sheets, baking dishes and meat platters abound. Typically these items are stackably stored in shelves, cupboards or drawers. The items having larger diameters, such as large frying pans, are placed on the bottom of a shelf, while items of diminishing diameter are stacked on top of the lowest frying pan. Similarly, pie pans of decreasing diameter are stacked on top of one another. Usually it is very difficult to obtain access to any one selected item from a particular stack of kitchen utensils. To gain access to the selected piece of equipment, a stack of items must be laboriously disassembled and stored temporarily elsewhere. This procedure wastes time, frays nerves and often leads to breakage of fragile glassware.
Another area where an efficient organizer is needed is to assist in more completely utilizing the available storage capacity of shelf or cupboard. Frequently in a shelf assembly a great deal of vertical space between each of the individual shelf panels is wasted since the items which are stored upon the bottom of each panel do not extend fully to the lower edge of the next higher shelf panel. Because of this characteristic, articles are typically stacked on top of one another to fill in this unused shelf storage area. This technique more efficiently utilizes the total available shelf space, but makes access to the items on the bottom of the shelf far more difficult.
Even in the commercial establishments there is a substantial need for an organizer which allows for more efficient utilization of a limited amount of space to store office supplies of various sizes. Typically, an office storage cabinet has a uniform spacing between shelves. A great deal of the available space between shelves is unused since boxes of pencils, packs of paper, paper clips, rubber bands and various other types of supplies cannot be stacked very high without making access to those items on the bottom of each shelf impractically difficult.
Stores or other commercial enterprises that maintain a large inventory of different types of supplies, which must be periodically removed, replaced and inventoried, would also benefit from a more efficient means of organizing their supplies. A shoe store uses a large number of shelves having a fixed spacing between the panels. A number of shoe boxes are stored between shelf panels by vertically stacking them on top of each other. After a clerk has removed the lowest box in a stack it is quite difficult and awkward to replace that shoe box in its proper position unless each of the other boxes in that stack is first removed. Because time is very important in the retail shoe business, clerks frequently do not replace shoe boxes in the correct shelf locations if an entire stack of boxes must be removed to do so. Because of this difficulty, clerks frequently replace a shoe box out of position on the top of a stack. Subsequently locating a misplaced shoe box takes an excessive amount of time since a trial and error search is necessary.
As tentative solutions to the above enumerated problems, several organizers have been developed. U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,900,053, 3,203,557, 3,407,938 and 3,207,098 describe variously configured racks or display apparatus which are constructed using wire arranged in a serpentine-like manner. While these patents describe devices which attempt to solve various other types of storage problems, none of these meet the various domestic and commercial needs which have been described above.